Editorial

Author:

Trix Bakker

This first issue of LIBER Quarterly has just 3 articles this time. The reason for this is that I didn’t receive any proceeding of the conference of the Groupe des Cartothecaires de LIBER (GdC) which took place in Paris, 29th August till 2 September 2006. The theme of this Paris meeting was “Cartographic materials: access and conservation”. You’ll only find a rather short summary written by Hélėne
Richard, chair of this expert committee. Although Hélėne ends the summary with “The proceedings will be published on the Liber website, …” there will just be this summary. The progress reports still have to be published on the website of the GdC.

The second article is written by Jola Prinsen, manager of Ticer (Tilburg Innovation Centre for Electronic Resources). Ticer organises high-quality international courses and provides consultancy and programming/development services. In this article Jola presents an overview of the Ticer courses since 1996. More than 1,000 individuals from 59 different countries attended one or more Ticer courses, mainly targeted at academic and
research libraries. The majority (79%) of the participants are from Europe. The article ends with the programme of the 2007 summer course ‘Digital libraries à la Carte 2007’ (27-31 August 2007) at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, which looks very promising with international experts from the library and information world.

The third article is from a totally different angle of incidence and written like a detective story by Jesper Düring Jørgensen, chief security advisor, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark. Jesper not only tells the story of an extensive book theft at the Royal Library in the 1970s, but also about the problem
how to claim the ownership of stolen books when they have reached the auction houses or antiquarian book dealers. Due to the solving of the thefts and new digital technology the Royal library created a special tool for book identification, Royal Identification Marks, a picture gallery of characteristic bindings, Royal monograms, stamps, ownership marks and shelf marks which makes it possible to link a particular book with the library.